How to Use Content Scoring to Get Better Results in Marketing

Looking for a way to better evaluate your marketing content? Consider content scoring. With content scoring, you’ll be able to give an unbiased quantitative score to each piece of content you create, which will make it easier to find out what’s working and what’s not in your marketing strategy.

How much content does your marketing team create that never gets read and does absolutely nothing to move the needle on your business goals?

That’s not to say that every blog post you publish or newsletter you send needs to go viral. However, if you’re creating content that seems to be of no interest to your target audience and gets zero meaningful engagement, wouldn’t you want to know why that is?

There are lots of UX research methods you can use to collect data on the user experience. Many of these tend to focus on the overall brand perception or overarching user experience. However, marketers would benefit from taking a different approach when it comes to content.

One such method you can use is called content scoring.

In this post, I’ll explain what content scoring is and why it’s a must when you’re doing any kind of content marketing. I’ve also included a step-by-step guide along with content scoring sheet examples you can use.

What Is Content Scoring?

There are so many valuable marketing metrics that help us see what’s going on with content on our websites, in our newsletters, on our social media channels and more. The problem is, these metrics don’t tell us much about what makes one piece of content so engaging and high-converting when others aren’t.

To figure out why content works well, we need another system.

Content scoring is a quantitative method of evaluating the quality and effectiveness of marketing content. Marketers create a content matrix or table and assign numerical scores based on predefined criteria.

In the case of something like a blog post, the criteria might include:

• Keyword usage
• Relevance
• Readability
• Scannability
• Visual attractiveness

For something like a newsletter, the criteria could be:

• Subject line length
• Subject line power words
• Visual attractiveness
• Message length
• Call-to-action effectiveness

The goal in content scoring is to objectively evaluate the quality of independent pieces of content you’ve created. Once you’ve devised the criteria and a system for scoring, this will allow you to see side-by-side what’s working and what’s not. If there are trends in success or failure, you’ll be able to spot them, too.

Once you’ve evaluated enough of your content over time, you’ll have a clearer sense for what your audience values in terms of content and offers. If you can take that information and use it to revise your marketing strategy, you should see not only improved engagement, but higher volumes of traffic from search as well.

How to Create a Content Scoring Sheet

The great thing about content scoring is that you can use it to optimize any aspect of your content marketing strategy. Here’s how to get started:

1. Choose One Type of Content to Evaluate

With content scoring, you can’t compare apples to oranges. So, you’ll need to segment your marketing content so that you can fairly compare the scores of one type of content against another.

For example, you should create separate content scoring sheets for:

• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• Social media ads
• YouTube videos
• Newsletters
• Podcast episodes
• Courses
• Google ads
• Organic search results

You can even use it to evaluate webpages, landing pages and your support documentation.

You may need to segment even more. For example, you could create scoring sheets for individual blog categories. Or specific blog post types (like listicles vs. thought pieces).

It all depends on how much content you have as well as what your goal is in doing this exercise.

For example, let’s say your business is about a year old. You’ve experimented with different YouTube video formats. While you’ve only done one a month so far, you would like to know overall which styles and contents are best received by your audience. So, there’s no need to segment your videos in this case.

Now, if you have loads of content—we’re talking like a HubSpot-sized blog—you are going to have to narrow down your list. It might not make sense to segment it by categories. However, you might want to focus on comparing the 20 top-performing and 20 lowest performing posts from the last year. This will give you a good range of what’s working and what’s not.

Content scoring takes quite a bit of time to do. It doesn’t have to be done all at once—you can do it in batches. However, try to pick a reasonable number of pieces to evaluate as you’re going to have to repeat this exercise again and again.

2. Align Your Criteria & Your Goals

You’ll score every piece of content in your scoring sheet against a certain set of criteria. But how do you determine what that criteria should be?

Ultimately, the criteria should relate to and help you accomplish your goals.

For example, let’s say you’re a tarot specialist and you’ve published eight related courses on your website. You’re not concerned so much with getting people to the courses as you’ve had no issue with web traffic or selling them. However, you find that students aren’t watching the courses all the way through and most don’t bother signing up for other courses when they’re done.

In this case, improving customer satisfaction and retention would be your main goals. So, what criteria should you assess when scoring this content?

Your biggest focus will be on the courses themselves. You could score them based on:

• The number of times the course product page is viewed on the website relative to how many times it’s purchased
• The average percentage of the course that students watch
• The average amount of time it takes students to complete the course relative to the course length
• The percentage of students who sign up for another course

These are, of course, quantitative statistics. That said, they do tell us a lot about how your students feel about the quality of your courses.

You can also use qualitative criteria like relevance, value and user-friendliness. This can be harder to evaluate because, for starters, you’d have to go through each course (or whatever piece of content you’re scoring) to evaluate its quality. Secondly, you’d need an unbiased party to do the reviewing—not only in this round, but any time you go through this content scoring exercise.

That said, if customer satisfaction and retention really matters, then it’s worth the time to do a deep evaluation of what’s working and what’s not.

3. Assign a Scoring System

Before you create a content scoring sheet, you have to first decide how you’re going to score each criteria. Here’s what I mean by this:

Let’s say you’re laser-focused on getting better SEO results for your blog. So, you’re looking at the following criteria:

• Keyword frequency
• Scannability (heading tags)
• Time spent on page
• Bounce rate
• Page loading speed

The problem with this is the criteria data points wildly vary. Keyword frequency is conveyed through percentages. Scannability is usually evaluated as qualitative results like “good” or “poor.” And page loading speeds are anywhere from 1 to 100.

We need a content scoring sheet to be quick and easy to analyze, and we can’t do that if we’re having to evaluate each criteria one at a time before switching gears and going onto the next.

So, we need to create a scoring sheet before the scoring sheet. This one, however, will assign a numerical value for each criteria. Here’s an example of how it would look:

In this grid, we put the scoring system at the top. In the left column are the criteria. We then fill in the columns with what data qualifies the criteria for a score of 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5.

At this stage, we’re not even looking at content. We’re simply trying to come up with a uniform and consistent quantitative system that will make the scoring process easier.

In addition, this scoring system helps anyone doing content scoring to do so in an unbiased manner. So, if Jane starts tomorrow at your agency, she won’t go giving a blog post with a 50% bounce rate a score of 5. She’ll have a reference for how your team determines success based on each criteria.

This sheet-before-the-sheet will also be helpful as time goes by. Whether it’s three months, six months or a year between your content scoring exercises, this sheet will allow everyone involved to make a fair comparison of how your content is performing against one another as well as over time.

4. Create Your Content Scoring Sheet

The next step is to create a scoring sheet that contains the content you want to compare.

This sheet will have the names of the content along the top row with the criteria in the left column. Because content names may be lengthy (or they might not have names at all), assign placeholder values to each. Just make sure you have a legend somewhere that links each post to its corresponding name in the table.

Once you’ve filled in the data along the top and left, your evaluator can go through and score each piece of content.

Here’s an example of how the end result might look:

With the table filled in, total up the scores at the bottom.

By the way, you don’t have to use a numerical system to evaluate your content. You could use a qualitative system and simplify the values. For instance, you could ask questions like:

• Is this blog post on brand?
• Does this post belong in the assigned category?
• Is the content easy to understand from top to bottom?
• Do the headings make sense?
• Is there a clear call to action?
• Does the content seem authentic and original?
• Are all the images relevant and necessary?
• Does the topic align with the intent of the users searching for the keyword?

Instead of assigning a number to these criteria/questions, you’d give them a “Yes” or “No” answer. Then you’d total up the number of “Yes” answers at the bottom of the table.

If you go with this method, it’s absolutely critical that you use the same person each time to score and evaluate your content. This will reduce the variability and conflicting biases that may show up when having multiple people perform the content scoring exercise.

5. Analyze the Data

As you can see from the content scoring sheet above, you have a much easier view now of what’s happening with your content.

For starters, you can use the content score totals to determine which pieces of content are the “best”—i.e., the most effective and valuable. You can also use it to identify underperformers.

You can then use the individual criteria scores to compare specific pieces of content against one another.

For instance, let’s say you have two social media posts about dating and astrology that performed very differently. When you look at the scores, you notice that they’re almost the same with the exception of hashtags and images.

Upon closer inspection, you notice that the first post didn’t pull in an image from the blog post automatically. So there was no visual component to it. That would explain why it performed so poorly in terms of “Images” and perhaps why it didn’t do as well as the second post engagement-wise.

You also notice that there aren’t as many hashtags in the first post and that a couple of them are misspelled. So, again, that would suggest that a stronger hashtagging (and proofreading) strategy could help improve your social media marketing results.

In some cases, you might not find discrepancies in your scores. If that’s the case, then this means you need to evaluate other criteria.

Sticking with the social media example, let’s say that those two astrology posts had the same score more or less. So, what other criteria could you examine?

Could you look at the day and time they were scheduled? Could you look at who the posts were targeted to (if at all)? Could you look at the formatting of the posts? For instance, did one use bullet points and emoji while the other was just a paragraph of text?

Content scoring will get you to look at your content in ways that you maybe hadn’t considered important before. Once you start to pick up on positive trends in your content, review and revise your marketing strategy accordingly. Over time, you should find that your content scoring exercises reveal fewer poor-performing content.

Wrapping Up

Content creation in marketing is time-consuming and can get quite costly if you devote your efforts to the wrong things.

With content scoring, you have an unbiased way to quantitatively evaluate the quality of your work. Not only does this help you figure out where your content strengths and weaknesses are, it can also help you make your content marketing strategy more effective and scalable over time.